Photos: Asus G71V quad-core laptop

Yesterday, the boys and girls of Asus sent us the G71V gaming laptop, and it wasn't long before we were drooling everywhere. It uses the world's first quad-core mobile CPU, which has four processing centres all whirring away like a hyper-intelligent half octopus with brains instead of legs. Yeah.

Each core on its Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 runs at 2.53GHz, and can dip into a quite monstrous 12MB of L2 cache across a 1,066MHz front-side bus. If none of that makes any sense to you, we'll make it simple: it's the fastest mobile CPU money can buy.

The rest of the G71V is impressive, too. It ships with up to 4GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM, 1TB of storage across two 500GB Hitachi hard disk drives, and has the option of a 2x Blu-ray rewriter drive, so you can author your own Full HD discs (with the appropriate software).

Graphics are sorted, too. The G71V ships with an Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT with 512MB of dedicated memory. This pumps visuals through the laptop's 17-inch 1,920x1,200-pixel display, or via the HDMI port at the rear to a big-screen display of your choice.

Other specs include a 2-megapixel webcam with face recognition login, four USB ports, Dolby Home Theater surround sound, 802.11n Wi-Fi, 2GB of Intel Turbo Memory, Windows Vista Ultimate edition and Express Gate.

Availability is TBC, but you can buy the top-spec model for a quite reasonable £1,999. A cheaper model with a Core 2 Duo chip can be had for £1,349. We'll have a full review soon, but in the meantime, hit 'Continue' below to bask in its glory.